Wife and Whore

I wrote this in 2005 for a creative writing assignment at university. I did send it out to a literary contest but I retitled it and called it "Guilty Pleasures". Stupidly, I sent it in as "Quilty Pleasures". When I noticed my error, I was mortified and doubted the judges read beyond the title. My professor gave "my story" top marks. (I am such an idiot.) (I would so like to change a word here and there but I won't.)

Around six years after I completed my degree in Creative Writing, I went to an event at the university and ran into several writers who had been in the program with me. One asked how my writing was coming along. "It's not," I replied. "Oh no, you are such a good writer. I thought you'd be famous by now!"


I never thought I was good enough. 

Wife and Whore or Guilty Pleasures

The graceless maiden plunked two cups of lukewarm coffee on the plastic tablecloth.  She serves my friend and me every other Saturday morning, in the booth by the window,  and though we have been coming to the diner for over two years, I have yet to see our multi-pierced waitress smile.  Without a word, she slid back to the counter and my friend noted that we hold little interest for the young.  By all appearances, we are two middle-aged housewives indulging in the ancient activity that sets social norms.

At first, we did gossip about a fellow journalist who had left her husband for a younger woman but, in the middle of one of my snide remarks, my friend leaned forward and, with an intensity I have seldom seen in her, began firing questions at me.

“Would you as a writer betray a confidence for the sake of a story?”

“No.” I said.

“What if what you are told is not labeled ‘confidential’?”

“I don’t understand.”

“What I’m asking is whether a writer can use, with integrity, all for a story unless the person or people involved specify that what is being said is secret?”

“You mean that anything I say to you now—idle chatter over coffee—might appear in a story?”

“Yes, unless you explicitly tell me that what you are saying is private. Listen.  I have to talk this through with someone.  Do you remember a couple of years back when I was given a grant to write in Italy?”

“Yes.”

“While I was there, I fell for an Italian writer.  He was at his summer home though, soon after, disappeared to his permanent residence in the north.  As we couldn’t get together to consummate our passion, we wrote each other long steamy letters.  Our affair was, in Henry Miller’s words. “a literary fuck-feast.”  His wife knew about the relationship, read our correspondence, and even wrote me herself.  When my husband arrived, I told him in detail about my infidelity and the letters.  Six months later, we returned to Canada.  The Italian and I continued to exchange letters for a while but without next-day-mail-delivery and the opportunity for an occasional fling, our passion died.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” 

“I didn’t want it turned into a sordid little love affair.  And for all our liberal discussions, I wasn’t sure how you’d react.  Anyway, enough time has passed. I’ve decided to write the story of my fling using my journal entries and our letters. 

“My husband is furious.  “Don’t make public what should remain private,” he yells.  “You’ll destroy me and the family.”

“An understandable reaction,” I muttered.

“There’s more,” she said.  “I’m getting static from the other side of the ocean.  When I wrote and told my ex-lover about what I was planning to do, he became angrier than my husband.  ‘I do not want my letters translated,’ he shot back.  ‘I wrote for your eyes only. If your story is published, I’ll write my version.  And just for spite, I’ll throw in a photograph or two.’”

“Photographs?  Are you out of your mind?  Why would you expose yourself and these men to ridicule?  They’ll probably hate you.”

She shrugged her shoulders.  “I am a writer.  Have you read “Portrait of a Marriage” in which Vita Sackville-West describes her affair with Violet Trefusis? No?  Within the text, Vita says she needed to tell the ‘entire truth.’  She despised the hypocrisy of her world and hoped, at a latter date, others would understand her ‘type’.  After her death, her son found the manuscript in a locked briefcase. He published it because he felt it was ‘among the most moving pieces she ever wrote.’”

“She didn’t publish it herself, did she?” I replied.  “She didn’t embarrass her husband, family, and friends.”

“She lacked the guts.  I know it wouldn’t have been easy but she should have published.  She could have been more influential.  There are writers who don’t hide their sexuality.  Thanks to them attitudes change.”

“Give me an example.” I said, refusing to let my friend off easy.

“Jane Rule for one.  Several years ago, at the Writer’s Festival in Vancouver, she spoke openly about ‘coming out.’  She said she writes about both heterosexual and lesbian love because the two exist.  She believes males and females—Timothy Findlay sat beside her—should have the choice to follow their natural bent.  One young woman in the audience stood up and thanked her. It was an intensely emotional moment.  The woman said that she would never have been able to accept herself if it weren’t for Rule’s writing.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s one... “

“Erica Jong is another,” my friend snapped.  She doesn’t shy away from sex. In her book about Henry Miller, she said...”

My friend paused, opened a notebook, flipped through it and read: “But what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t take chances?  Hating Henry... was about my own fear of self-exposure... without taking chances one cannot tell the truth, and what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t tell the truth?”

“Truth,” I snorted.  “Your truth will likely be sloughed off as yet another female confession.  Is it worth it?”

“Yes, damn it, yes.  Maxine Hong Kingston, in an interview, spoke about truth.”  She paused and flipped once more through her journal.  “Kingston said, ‘There’s a lot in society that says, don’t tell this secret, don’t tell that... What you have to tell is not beautiful, or unacceptable, or too crazy... It’s always important to tell the truth because if you don’t there are all kinds of terrible social and psychological consequences.’”

My friend’s voice was shaking.  She began talking faster.  “People are afraid of the truth.  They’re afraid if they show and tell all, they’ll be judged by family or friends or that big man in the sky to be abnormal.  What the hell is normal?  Can you think of one family that doesn’t own an eccentric or a black sheep?  Sometimes it takes several generations to reveal the wayward aunt, the two-timing father, or worse.   Then and only then, can they laugh at their relative’s antics.  What’s more, they are pleased that one of their own provided a good story. 

“Must someone die before we tell the truth?  We have to face the facts about family and self now.  If we don’t we’ll never be free from neurosis.”
 

I raised my hand.  “Stop.”  Needing time to digest all that was being said, I signaled the graceless maiden and ordered another coffee.  After she had poured and left, my friend continued. 

“If the truth be known, I’m glad that distance freed me from my family’s tight-ass attitude.  Mom and Dad would have had heart attacks if they’d known what I was up to in Italy.  My affair, even for me, was frightening.  But, damn it all, it was also fantastic.  For the first time in years, I liked myself.  What’s more, I came to know my strengths.  Words poured out of me.  And, after twenty years of marriage, my husband revealed himself.  He was magnificent.  When I first told him, he said that if I had done it, it must have been necessary.  Now the fool forgets the beauty of the story.  He doesn’t see his actions and reactions as indicative of his love and intelligence.  He worries what others will think. 

“For his sake, I’ve agreed to mask his identity and the Italian’s with different names and nationalities.  I’ve agreed to use a pseudonym.  Still, both of them are afraid of being recognized.  They do whatever they damn well please and then accuse me of being immoral.  Like most men, they say they want a wife in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom, but when I give them what they want, they yell, “Don’t tell. Don’t tell.”  Both think that I write for my own amusement at their expense.”

 “Hold on,” I interrupted.  “In a sense you do write for your own amusement.  You’re not completely selfless.”

“Okay, I’ll concede you that point.  A good story, even given the hard work, is a pleasure to write and see in print.  And this one, with all its wild sex, is sure to find a publisher.  Still I’m having a hell of a time getting it down.  Some of it is damn painful.  These men worry about their precious reputations while I’m bent on destroying mine.  Evelyn Conlon, an Irish writer, once said that when a man writes about lust and promiscuity, the reader assumes he is using his imagination; when a woman writes about the same, she is speaking from personal experience.

“Is it a sin to want experience?  I feel that I should apologize.  Ridiculous.  I will not let others dictate what I can or can’t write.  I will not let others edit my life.  Carolyn Heilbrun says that a woman’s usual fate in literature is marriage or death, the end.  I can’t live such fiction.  Nor write it.  What do I do to my children if I leave them thinking that everything was always rosy in their parents’ marriage?  What happens when they discover that their own marriages aren’t fairy tales?  Do I really do them a favour keeping my big mouth shut?”

“Perhaps not,” I snapped.  “But why advocate infidelity?  Do you think every woman should break from convention?  Should I go out and find a lover to add heat to my marriage?”

“No, no, no.  You sound like my husband.  He thinks I’m hot to brag about my ‘little affair.’  He sneeringly asks if I have nothing better to write about. Honestly, I don’t know what is more important than our love relationships.  I’m not saying, ‘Do as I do.’   Every story that’s written is not an incitement to action. I describe my pain and pleasure.  I didn’t go to Italy looking for an affair.  It happened. 

“You can’t deny that adultery exists.  So why can’t I write about the reality and not some flimsy fantasy like “The Bridges of Madison County?”  Or are you one of those people who believe that if you ignore something it will go away? Look around you.  In the last few years, how many of our friends’ marriages have fallen apart?  Stop judging.  That’s not what writing is all about.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” I muttered.  “But I was raised in a family where whatever happened between the family’s four walls was private.  Once when my parents were having a violent argument, my little sister called the police.  While I huddled in a corner shaking with fear, she had the nerve to act.  How I admired her.  Who knows what would have happened if she hadn’t?”

“I was brought up the same way.  ‘If you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything.’  Can’t you see I’m scared shitless?  I’m going against the grain.  I must.  Time is passing.  Ever since I was little, I’ve been devouring books.  Writers have given me permission to accept my wayward thoughts.  They have shown me different ways of looking at the world.  I am filled with words.  Carl Jung said that we lead small lives if we keep to ourselves.  Well, I have this grandiose idea that it’s my turn to give.

“As far as I’m concerned, the greater betrayal is to stop talking, to stop telling the truth.  I’m terrified of sending my story out into the world but I’m more terrified not to.  I don’t want to become another statistic.  Tillie Olsen, in “Silences”, wrote that eleven out of twelve women writers are suppressed before they find their voice.  No matter what anyone says, I will tell my story.”

“You have guts, my friend,” I said.  “No sense. But you definitely have guts.”  I raised my coffee cup and saluted her.

I left my friend mulling over her coffee.  I hate to admit it but I envy her her passion.  I envy her idealism.  As I finish writing out our conversation, I fear that I am betraying her.  No.  She didn’t specify beforehand that the discussion was confidential.

"Happiness is a butterfly"

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately, and a lot of reading, and if I am to think about this time when I am housebound as a retreat (re Elizabeth Gilbert), I want to retreat, to take the time to sort myself and calm myself down. I am feeling so scattered and lost. Yet I am not unhappy.

I'm reading four books plus my old journals and my head is swimming but I'm catching glimpses of excitement. ... so let me try to make a straight path or slightly curved one and bring myself into focus.

On Facebook, Gilbert copied out a page from an old journal. Her instruction to herself for a free and happy life is simply "No outside validation" and "Gratitude for all things".  The whole page is a repeat of these two phrases.

I imagine that if one commits acts of kindness just for oneself and not applause this would make one feel good - an embrace to self. And if one was grateful for everything, including self, (especially self?) that would make you/me happier.

It used to be so easy to be happy.

When I think of my children when they were young and my grandsons now, I see that all were born with an abundant capacity for happiness. And every one is unique with a definite like or dislike for various activities, food, people - and was from day one. We, the adult, listen to the child and watch with fascination at what fascinates him or her. We allow the child full range unless whatever could injure the small precious human being.

Somehow, somewhere most become weighed down with responsibilities, doing what one thinks one should be doing and losing the exuberance and playfulness of the child. I remember Michael telling me about an assignment in school. He was to write about what he valued most and, though I cannot remember the response, he wrote "fun". I was impressed. (Once, in my teens I told my mother that I wanted to have fun and she said, "Yvonne, life is not supposed to be fun.")

In his teens, Michael begged for an Apple computer because he wanted to create animations. He said if he could have this, do this, he'd be the happiest guy in the world. Rob and I bought him his computer.

As far as I know, he no longer creates animation. I imagine him saying that he has to make a living to support his family. He has creative work and extraordinary talent but it is not animation. My question, at this moment, is does he regret not following his youthful dream?

The reason I'm thinking this is because of a friend's request for poetry and I look at my book shelf and alight on Roger Housden's "Ten Poems to Change Your Life" in which he includes "Love after Love" by Derek Walcott.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

I have read several interpretations of this poem. Huston suggests that Walcott is giving us hope, that at some point in our lives we will - through effort or by chance - recognize the self we were born with in all its uniqueness.

Another review states that Walcott wrote this poem after a relationship failed. "From the outset the suggestion is that the individual will start to acknowledge an inner self," he writes and "What has been a split psyche can become whole again."

For me, it's a kind of permission to listen to my inner self - perhaps to recognize what Housden calls "the particular energetic response to life" that I had from my beginning.

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." -  Nathaniel Hawthorne

Dances with Words

I am so anxious these days that I have begun writing letters to myself. This calms me a little but today, an hour later, I again get butterflies.

I decide to clean my office as it doesn't please me. (I have already done this twice in the past two weeks.) I begin with a cupboard of odds and ends - a few travel journals, a scrap book, a notebook full of dreams, and several end-of-year journals created by the writing department of UBC. They are thin and only around 15 pieces are included, supposedly the best stories written by students for that calendar year.

I find my name in the index of 1995 and read my short non-fiction article. I am not overwhelmed but this was 25 years ago when I dreamed of becoming a writer. What happened? I don't know. Life got in the way and then as now I expect too much of myself.

So just for the record I'm going to record one of my first attempts at polishing a story. I am tempted to rewrite it but I won't. 

Dances with Words

Sometimes when I'm happy, I find myself doing a grand jete across the living room carpet or a soft shoe on the kitchen tile floor. Often, after a drink or two, I can't contain myself and cavort wherever I am. At forty-five, I enjoy dancing in a way I never could in my late teens.

"If it doesn't hurt, you aren't doing it right." I heard this line countless times at York University. As a theatre and dance major, I spent half my days at a wooden barre which ran the circumference of a huge gymnasium. Head held high, chest forward, bottom tucked under, I followed the classical exercises developed to force my body beyond its natural limits. Often after several hours of fighting myself, I would sit in the change room and cry. I was a circus animal being trained to perform unnatural acts to amuse an audience. No, I wasn't. A caged animal didn't have a choice: I was there willingly.

I'd wanted to be a dancer since I was eight years old, living with my family in a Toronto suburb. The Tilley kids lived next door and that summer their aunt, a ballet mistress in New York city, came to visit. She organized, on the small plot of grass in front of their brick bungalow, dance lessons for her nieces and me. After several sessions, she advised my mother to send me to ballet school: I was a born dancer. My mother, a frantic young woman of twenty-eight who was trying her best to raise my three sisters and me, had neither the inclination nor the means to get me to dance classes.

I was inspired to dance again when at fourteen I fell in love with the choreographer of my high school play. His mother ran the town's own dance school. Although my mother was still frantic, she did not object to classes because money was freer and the school was within walking distance.  In a shabby basement studio with barres running the length of two walls and an enormous mirror at one end, I pushed my body to perform.

As well as attending classes four days a week, I frequented dance spectacles to observe professional dances in action. By the end of most performances, my muscles ached from tensing and releasing in unison with those on stage. Such was not the case when I saw Martha Graham give one of her last performances. I forgot the mechanics of dance. I forgot the rest of the audience. Nothing registered except the presence of the grand matron of modern dance. 

She stood center stage, her tall figure shrouded in brown cloth like a mourner in Giotto's Lamentation. As if painted by the master himself, she confronted the audience without movement. Two achingly long minutes passed. Suddenly her head dropped forward and one arm, out of the folds of fabric shot upward. Her every move throughout the dance told of despair. Like a sorceress, she bewitched the audience.

I did not, even then, aspire to Graham's magic. I simply wanted to master technique and express myself through an art form I love. After struggling for two years at university, I realized that I had neither the body nor the attitude to perform professionally. 

I left and joined the Globe and Mail as a copywriter. Years passed. I married, moved to Vancouver, produced three children and finished my undergraduate degree. As I had once expressed myself through dancing, I now express myself through writing. Sometimes when I'm happy, I can't contain myself and words flow effortlessly. More often, I despair: words can never express what Martha Graham could with one simple thrust of her arm to the heavens. 

I found this an interesting exercise - to type out my twenty-five year old thoughts. They are so simple. Everything I write is simple and yet if I am to believe my friend Susan, simple writing is difficult.

Speaking of Susan, I found a note from her in my cupboard that she wrote me around thirty years ago:

"O YVONNE, LETS LIVE IN A FOOLS PARADISE. LETS PRAISE FOLLY AND PRACTICE IT. AT LEAST YOU HAVE FORCED ME TO THINK ABOUT - BY YOUR COMPLAINTS - WHAT A BIG THING BEING A FOOL IS - THE BIGGEST THING IN THE WORLD, THE BIGGEST WE CAN ACHIEVE. I WISH I HAD THE COURAGE TO BE A FOOL. AT LEAST YOU HAVE TAUGHT ME WITH ALL THIS CLAMOUR TO SEE CLEARLY THAT THIS IS WHAT I WANT. IT'S ALSO WHAT I RESPECT IN OTHER PEOPLE, REALLY RESPECT. BEING HAPPY AND HAVING THE COURAGE TO BE FOOLS IS VERY MUCH THE SAME THING. LETS BE HAPPY. S"

In four months, Susan turns 94. I wish I had the freedom to run over and talk to her, to remind her of this note but although she is only a block away, I am not allowed to visit and even if I could, I would be afraid that I'd contaminate her. She is so fragile.

Being house-bound is not the worst thing in the world. Not being able to visit those I love drags me down, makes me want to cry.

APRÈS ANAÏS NIN

Today, I have been cleaning my files, shredding what's unnecessary or duplicated.

Somewhere along the way I've forgotten my love of words and writing. I have been waylaid by my parents' deaths and self-imposed responsibilities and the feeling that I'm losing it.

Among my files, I found a quote by Goethe:

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too."

I also came across a file of my writing and found a short prose piece that I had entered into a literary contest and won - second place (but one of the judges said it should have been first).

This short piece rolled from my pen. I imagined that I was Nin having a private conversation with Henry Valentine Miller:

"In a miniscule hotel room in Montmartre, I light candles and incense, sit with pen in hand gazing into space.  Have I ever told you, dear Henry, that my fingers are the most sensual part of my body?  They love the feel of a fountain pen, nib posed on an expanse of virginal white.   When I begin, I write slowly not knowing what to say or where to go.  But my fingers know.  They move by instinct, without calculation, playing with words, with phrases, even clichés—a kind of foreplay you might say.  The quiet strokes of my pen are an aphrodisiac willing me to go on and on, write faster and faster, until I reach the climax.  I want my brow to drip, my palms to sweat, my heart to beat faster.  Yours too.

The heater hisses.  I remove my clothes and imagine myself creating, in your words, a “literary fuck feast”.  Read me naked, if you dare.  As I explore myself on the page and you me, the juices start flowing.  I want to touch you in forbidden places.  Part of the pleasure of writing is going where I’m not supposed to go, saying what I’m not supposed to say.  I am allowed to be carnal, if I dare.  I dare.

With my fingers, I caress the page, a single leaf in the body of a notebook, delighting in its smoothness and the scent of paper and ink.  My nipples harden.  I spread my legs and expose a Georgia O’Keeffe flower in full bloom.  I love the colour of language, the taste of a well-chosen metaphor, and a whiff of indiscretion.  I am an adulteress.  The page is my lover. It lies before me awaiting my touch, loving the way I play and tease words onto paper.  I fill one line and then another, one page and then another, until I am panting and know, without a doubt, that I have found my true love.  This is where I belong.  This is what I should be doing.  I write faster and faster, faster and faster.  Where am I going?  I don’t care.  I am letting go of thought, moving for the sake of movement.  I can’t stop myself.  I am filled with desire.  I want to explode on the page.  I want… I want… I want... the climax.  My body dissolves.

Later, when I am refreshed, I look at this page and read what I have written and see that I have gone further than I intended to go.  “You are good,” I whisper to my love.  'You are so damn good.'  I know that tomorrow I will doubt my lust, my words.  My husband, my censor, who demands monogamy, will walk in, without knocking, and tear me apart limb by limb, sentence by sentence, word by word.  I don’t care at the moment.  I am in love."

One of the judges wrote: "This short piece of writing is extremely sensual, particularly the Georgia O'Keefe flower in full bloom. Good metaphor. The comparison with the page (body) of writing to the human body is well done. Then the protagonist's writing, which includes the "colour of language", etc. (and rises to an incredible climax) leaves everyone (reader and writer) satisfied and in love.

I liked this very much. Congratulations."

I was so proud of myself. 

Today I Dressed Up just for the Hell of it

I wrote this yesterday:

Some days I only dress in the afternoon. Other days I only dress early evening before I go on my allowed hour walk around the village.

Some days, I'm happy having time on my hands. Other days, I'm blue: I wonder how long it will be before I can hug, play, share a meal with family and friends. I am grateful that I had Paris, Vancouver, and London before the coronavirus really spread like wildfire and airports closed.

Now Rob and I "play" alone or quietly together, a little afraid of the Chronopost man who delivers parcels with gloved hands and we receive with bare hands (and immediately go to the sink and scrub).

When I awoke this morning and took my latte to the terrace still in my bathrobe, I thought it might be fun to dress up for a change - just for the hell of it. So I showered, dried my hair, applied a little rouge and lipstick, and chose one of my favourite dresses and sweaters - both from one of my favourite Parisian designer, Manuelle Guibal.

I wonder what Rob thinks of me. Does it matter to him if I'm wearing rags or riches? He never says so I dress for myself.

Feeling pretty, I signed my Attestation stating date and time, Rob signed his and we set off for a walk through the deserted town streets, down a hill, and stopped at a glorious stone wall for a glass of rose. (I had opened the bottle before leaving home, corked it, and put it in a sac with a couple of glasses just in case we felt like a libation in our liberated hour.)

I asked Rob to take a picture for the store. I worry about how it is going to survive with a full stock of spring and summer wear and the necessity of ordering for fall and paying the required 50% deposit.

I worry about all the designers including my beloved Manuelle Guibal and her large wonderful family. Does anyone want to buy beautiful clothes when, for the most part, their customers spend most of their time at home? Both LeslieJane and Manuelle Guibal have on-line stores but how willing are women to buy clothes without trying them on? Do they worry about the clothes being infected either by staff, packers, delivery people? (I have done a fair bit of reading about this and with a few precautions, it is safe.)

I know I am lucky. Rob too. We have few expenses. We have easy access to food and wine. We have computers with which we can see and talk to those we love, keep up with the news, watch movies, and listen to music. Rob is even taking an on-line French course.

Yes, we are lucky. The sun is shining and we live in one of the most beautiful villages in France and, as far as I know - and I say this in a whisper because I don't want to jinx it - we have no COVID-19 cases.

Birthday Morning

Last year I was wearing a kimono and wandering around the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest in Kyoto with Rob, Brendan, Jane, Seb and Helen. It was the best birthday I ever had, a dream come true.

This year I am in self-imposed isolation in my house in France - after a trip to Paris, Vancouver, and London - though thank the heavens Rob is with me. I have not left the house in ten days and after four more days I am allowed outside for one hour a day as long as I do not go one kilometre from my front door. I must also carry an "Attestation" noting what time I left my house and the purpose of my excursion.

As of today, the Coronavirus has attacked 664, 621 people of which 142,368 have recovered. Sadly, 30, 891 have died.

Is it any wonder that I am thinking of death? When I arrived home, not knowing if I had caught the virus en route - two planes, two trains, a taxi and an Uber - I kept thinking that I should treat the two weeks of isolation as if they were my last and only do things that made me feel good and ignore the cobwebs and kitchen floor. So what have I been doing? Amongst other things, vacuuming up cobwebs and scrubbing the kitchen floor.

I feel frozen, scared and curious. How is the Covid-19 going to play out?

I have also been reading a lot of trashy novels and one good book - "Turn: The Journal of an Artist" by Anne Truitt in which she explores her day to day life as a woman, artist, and mother while at the same time recognizing that she is aging and that her life is approaching an end.

I wish I had noted more passages that hit me in the gut and perhaps I'll re-read it but for now I am caught up in her relationship with her children and grandchildren.

"The most painful fact that I have to grasp is that parental protection is an impossibility. It is also counterproductive. I cannot in honesty wish to deprive my children of the particular knowledge they can garner only from making their own decisions, and their own mistakes. No matter how much I love my children, I can merely continue to keep them company in their lives. And we all occasionally feel the chill breath of our inevitable separation by way of death."

"Come now myself to the late autumn of my life, I too am hung with its history. Certain parts of my personality remain intractable. I do not see them changing by way of any effort I can make. And when I come to die, I will die with the detritus of my history: the decay of mistakes made, of promises unfulfilled. I see this fact clearly, but with a profound, contented acceptance that in a mysterious way harmoniously contains it."

I am not sure that I have reached this point of acceptance but, from time to time, I feel a loosening of my own expectations to be something other than I am.

Some Mother's Daughter

(This is a story I wrote about my mother 18 years ago. It was short-listed for the Canadian Literary Awards. I told my mother this and also that if she read it, she'd kill me. She laughed and that was it: she never asked to see it. The title is taken from the film "Some Mother's Son" in which a mother, a pacifist learns of her son's involvement in the IRA.)

I continued to reflect that she was dangerous...she
prevented me from liking myself. I, who was so naturally
meant for happiness and gaiety, had been forced into
a world of self-criticism and guilty conscience... 
              

                                                              Françoise Sagan

On my dining room wall is a picture of my mother holding a bouquet of roses on her wedding day, July 9, 1947. She is eighteen years old. Under the long pale green gown, her belly is beginning to swell. She looks happy enough, while my father, leaning on her arm as if to steady himself, appears glum and frail. My mother’s parents, to the left of the newly weds, stand rigidly, arms at their sides, like the couple in Grant Wood’s painting, “American Gothic”. My grandmother could not have been pleased with the marriage. She was embarrassed about the ways of the flesh and never spoke to her eldest daughter about menstruation, copulation, or conception. How then did my mother tell her she was pregnant when she hadn’t been given words with which to approach the subject? She recalls only that my father asked hers for her hand in marriage and that my grandfather replied: “Can you keep her?”

My father lied. Although he was six years older than my mother and had worked several years as an insurance agent, he had squandered his wages and hadn’t saved a farthing. He wasn’t looking for a wife, let alone a child, when he first spoke to my mother in the office building where she worked as a secretary. Just as he entered the foyer, my mother recognized the young man she’d been eyeing for months and, startled, she dropped her lunch. He rushed over, bent down, and returned it to her. Without thinking, she denied it was hers because slabs of cheese were falling from the sandwich. She did not want the dark-haired stranger to know she ate such common food. My mother hates anything common. When we were children, she forbade us to wear kerchiefs, to chew gum in public, or to say the word “sweat”.

My father was so enchanted by the fair-haired maiden looking him straight in the eye and lying, that he asked her to the pictures. Before long, they were playing games in the hayloft of my grandfather’s barn while my mother chanted, “Stop it, I like it. If you don’t do it again, I’ll go home.” (Only in recent years has my mother been able to tell me about her youthful sexual self.) Once, when she was sick in bed, my father was allowed to visit her room and the brash young man, under her parent’s roof, hopped into her bed—but not before he had slipped off his trousers, folded them along the crease, and laid them on a chair. Years later, as my mother stood ironing my father’s underwear, she said, “Your dad has always been a fussy man. His mother warned me if I married ‘Sir Edward’ he would take the lining from my best coat to shine his shoes.”

Despite the warning, she married her knight and six months later gave birth to a daughter. Almost immediately, the pair set themselves the task of making another baby: in post-war Northern Ireland, only couples with two children could apply for a rental home. Fifteen months later, I was born and my family moved into a small three-bedroom bungalow a short distance from my grandparents’ home. Unlike my older sister who had been colicky and demanding, I was an easy baby who would lie in a pram for hours without making a sound. My mother dressed her two girls like dolls and visited daily with her mother and sisters, until another fateful incident put an ocean between her and her family.

One lunch hour my father accompanied a pal who wanted to immigrate to Canada, to the Canadian Embassy. For lack of anything better to do, my father also filled in an application. His friend’s was refused; my father’s was accepted. Still he had no intention of moving to Canada until he told his father-in-law. My grandfather laughed until the tears flowed. “Far-off fields look green,” he tittered. “You’ll go to Canada on a boat called The Never Budge.” At that moment my father, who hated being laughed at, decided to emigrate.

Within six months, he left to find work in Canada. Two months later, he wired for his family. Leaving her own distraught mother behind, my mother bundled up the poor woman’s only grandchildren and set sail to join her husband.  Seasick for most of the journey, she did not think about the family she had left behind, until the boat docked off the shores of Newfoundland. After embracing my father, she began to cry and she continued to cry for the next six months. When I told this to a therapist, she shook her head and quietly asked: “How could your mother love you and give you the attention you needed when she, herself, was consumed with grief?”

“My mother loves babies,” I responded.

“That doesn’t mean she loved you.”

As a child, I was careful not to upset my mother. When monsters crept into my bedroom at night, I hid under the covers. When they slipped under the blankets with me, I squeezed my eyes tight. When they slid under my eyelids, I woke up my older sister who led me to the washroom and stood guard, bleary eyed, while I sat on the toilet. I never understood why this sister who teased and tormented me during the day, was so kind to me at night.

My mother never knew about my nightmares or my sister’s good deeds. She continued throughout our childhood to call her the difficult child and me, the easy one. Never thinking that the labels she gave us were harmful, she eventually gave all five of her daughters labels.  Four years after my birth, the smart one was born, then the pretty one, and finally the baby. Recently, when all five of us met in a crowded restaurant—together for the first time since we left home—my older sister said that she wishes she’d been less difficult as a child. I spoke of the panic I feel when I am being difficult. The smart sister said that she becomes angry when we assume that all comes easily to her. The pretty one told us that she is still trying to prove to herself that she has a brain in her head. The baby was the only one without regrets.

“I’ve always felt that I was a good mother,” my mother once told us. “I guess that’s for you kids to judge. I did the best I could with what I had. We were brought up to always be well dressed, well spoken, and to be seen and not heard. So I tried to do that with you.”

She succeeded. As a child, I knew I must be dressed for the occasion and speak only when spoken to. I learned, whether consciously or not, that this would win her love and approval. As an adult, remnants of this remain. I am often uneasy in social situations. I worry that I have dressed inappropriately or, more significantly, that I have spoken out of turn or said something unacceptable. More times than not, my mother-in-me rises to the surface to question and taunt me.

My mother would be surprised at my anger and pain. She doesn’t question the child-rearing practices of her parents. Even now, over seventy years later, with a wealth of new literature on the subject, she continues to boast about her heritage. Given an opening, she’ll talk about her grandfather, the first man in Northern Ireland to own a car, or she’ll speak at length about her father as if he were still alive and running his hundred-acre dairy farm. She’ll sing praises to her mother who, with the help of two servants, maintained an eight-bedroom house and raised seven children to be hard-working and clean-living. All my aunts and uncles received a public school education, attended the local Quaker Church twice every Sunday, and drove a tractor before their tenth birthday. According to my grandmother’s belief that females should have at least one social grace, her four girls were privileged with piano lessons.

My mother insists that her childhood was idyllic, her parents, kind and loving. “Mother really didn’t have too many vices, really and truly. She was always soft-spoken.” “Didn’t she ever yell or scream at you?” I ask. “She would if we did something that she disliked,” my mother replies, contradicting herself. “She’d come over and give us a smack. She’d smack us practically every day, whereas Dad just spanked us if we really needed it.” She remembers being beaten only once by her father and even though she doesn’t remember what she did. “Obviously it was very bad because there were welts on my legs and yet Daddy loved us so much.”

Raised according to what Jungian analyst, Erich Neumann, calls the “old ethic” in which negative feelings and behavior are suppressed, where the needs of the individual for self-expression are less important than the needs of the group, my mother doesn’t question her parents’ discipline although, in her teens, she resented the restrictions placed on her. Amongst other things, she was not allowed to wear lipstick, paint her nails, or go to dances. “That didn’t mean that I didn’t do these things but they didn’t know I did.” When she married, she continued to do as she pleased and, if she thought her husband would not approve, she hid the evidence from him. My father wasn’t a tyrant but he was exacting and many of my parents’ fights began because he caught my mother in a lie. He rarely spoke of his parents but I gather from my mother that he adored his mother, a tiny wisp of a woman, who was twenty-five years younger than her husband and who would have starved herself rather than see her children go out in public poorly dressed.

If my father thought that all women were as self-sacrificing as his mother, his wife taught him otherwise. She kept up the image of perfect wife and mother in Northern Ireland but after her move to Canada, she was too depressed. Nothing my father said or did could stop the flow of tears. Finally, against his principles, he borrowed money and shipped her and the children back to her mother. We arrived in time to attend one of her sister’s weddings.
My mother, who remembers all events by the clothes she or her daughters wore, said that my sister and I stole the show in matching lilac organdy dresses trimmed with white lace and white straw hats banded with lilac satin. She loved being a visitor in her parent’s home: her sisters cared for her children and she came and went as she pleased.

Yet five months after the wedding my mother telephoned my father and asked for the fare back to Canada. Although my father says that she’d worn out her welcome, the truth is simpler. She knew her place was beside her husband. Having always lived by society’s rules, she could not have stood the stigma that separation or divorce carried in the fifties. Even today, she views every marriage breakdown as a failure and, most often, blames the woman. When she saw the film, Shirley Valentine, her only comment was: “What woman would leave her husband to become a waitress?”

My father, who has prayed on his knees every night, for as long as I can remember, lived as a monk while his family was in Ireland. When we returned, he gave his daughters a box of Laura Secord lollipops and his wife enough warmth to create their smart daughter, born within a year of our return. Four months after this birth, my mother was pregnant again, this time with the pretty one.  After her birth, we moved to a slightly larger house—as had become my parents’ custom with the arrival of each baby—in a small town thirty miles from the city where my father worked long hours. Here, much to his delight, my mother delivered their only son.

After my brother’s birth, my mother joined the Conservative Party, the Canadian equivalent of her parent’s political organization and found, within its committee rooms, the recognition and applause she had not received as an unpaid laborer in her home.  “I gave it everything I had,” my mother recalls, “and even though I know at times my family came second to it, I always had to prove to myself that I was completely dedicated. I loved it.” In a matter of years, she rose from seventh vice-president to president of the provincial party—the only woman to date who has earned that distinction.

During those years, I did not celebrate my mother’s victories. I was angry with her, not for the endless hours she spent in committee rooms, but because my older sister and I had to baby-sit our younger siblings and lie to our father about her whereabouts. Once she invited me to accompany her to help at an out-of-town leadership convention. In my mind’s eye, I see her standing at a podium, addressing a large crowd who listened hard and applauded wholeheartedly. I remember my confusion. How could I reconcile that vibrant outspoken woman with the wife at home who cowered at her husband’s bark? I failed to see that, away from my father, outside the patriarchy, my mother was in her element and had her own unique voice.

At fourteen, when my fourth sister was born, I realized for the first time what my mother must have done to make this baby. I was disgusted. A woman of thirty-six, I thought, should have been above such nonsense. A year or two after this birth, I became even more offended by her behavior. I had started dating a boy several years older than myself and she, an avid reader of Harlequin romances, took an over-active interest in my romance. At the urging of a younger liberated friend—this was the sixties—my mother supplied my boyfriend with a dozen condoms. Her liberalism died however whenever I displeased her. She was not above name-calling and more than once stung me with “slut.” I was her first daughter—my older sister began dating after me—to remind her, I now assume, of her own short-lived venture into the world of love and lust. “These are the best years of your life,” she kept telling me. “Enjoy yourself.” I hated those years nearly as much as I hated her living vicariously through me. The more she tried to involve herself in my life, the less I shared with her.

Throughout my teens my parents fought and, for some reason that I still cannot fathom, they singled me out from all their children and woke me to witness battles that were cruel, abusive, and often sexual. The thought of these still churns my stomach. When I finally left home, I was free of them. Or so I thought. I went to university—an action my parents neither encouraged nor hindered. “When you were growing up you always had to be nicely dressed,” my mother informs me. “There wasn’t a great deal of money around. We were trying to buy our house. There was no such thing as saving for an education.”

My mother believes a house is the barometer of success. She and my father bought and sold five houses during my childhood, each one more luxurious than its predecessor. I am “woman enough” as Erica Jong writes in her poem of that name, to appreciate my mother’s need for a nice home: “I sit at my typewriter/ remembering my grandmother/ & all my mothers,/ & all the minutes they lost/ loving houses better than themselves.”
 
Recently, I learned that both my great-grandmothers were illiterate. I am the only woman in my grandmother’s, and mother’s family to hold a university degree. Save for an education? The thought would never have crossed my mother’s mind. In my arrogant youth however, I was angry at this lack of forethought. Why didn’t she insist that her daughters pursue an education and career, I questioned, when she herself had suffered all her life from a lack of financial independence? All her comings and goings and material needs were based on the weekly allowance her husband gave her. When she needed more, she begged or borrowed. I swore that I would never be that dependent on a man. I swore that I would not live like her yet, time and time again, I find myself living an adapted version of her life. When I telephoned, for instance, half-drunk from a night of celebrating, to tell her that I was getting married, I thought she would applaud my conventional behavior. Instead, she exploded and told me not to be ridiculous. When I visited the next day, at her request, to discuss her objections, not one word was said about the wedding. At the time, I assumed she knew that nothing she could say would make a difference. I assumed that she wasn’t pleased about this union. My chosen was not a man she could write home about. His mother was a waitress. His father, a florist’s assistant, had never owned a car. I now wonder if I underestimated her. Perhaps, she was remembering her own young marriage. I do not know.

Several years after my wedding, my partner and I moved across the country and only as I write this do I realize that this is roughly the same distance my mother traveled from her mother when she left Northern Ireland. Unlike my mother, I didn’t cry. I was happy to miss the obligatory Sunday meal at my parents’ home and their inevitable quarrels. I thought that in moving so far, I was beyond their sphere of influence but, at the beginning of my third pregnancy, I realized I was still dependent on my mother’s good will. There had been serious complications with my second delivery and my mother had blamed me; according to her, I was too old to be having babies. Instead of telephoning when my pregnancy was confirmed, I wrote her a letter and asked her to fake enthusiasm if my news did not please her. “The child in me still wants your approval.” She telephoned laughing and congratulated me.

Six months later, I gave birth to my only daughter.

On my dining room wall, below the picture of my mother on her wedding day, is a recent photograph of my mother, my fifteen-year-old daughter, and me, at a local beach. My mother stands at attention in black sweater and trousers, gold shining around her neck, wrist, and fingers. Born in the British Empire in the 1920’s where class, in Doris Lessing’s words, was a straitjacket, an imperative, a crippler, where sentiment was more important than truth, where clothes were more important than the needs of the body they covered, my mother unwittingly adopted the life of her mother with its outward symbols of success. My daughter and I, with my mother’s fair hair and green eyes, look like poor relatives—me, in sloppy t-shirt and jeans; my daughter, in snug tank top with belly button exposed and short skirt. All three of us, I realize from the photograph, are as much products of our respective times as we are products of each other. I was born in the era where women were burning their bras and questioning the traditional roles of wife and mother. Spurred on by such mentors as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Doris Lessing, and Adrienne Rich, I assumed that my life would be richer than my mother’s simply because I willed it. I did not expect the angst, the visceral pain a woman experiences as she differs and distances herself from her first love. Only now, in middle age, do I see that for two women, albeit mother and daughter, to differ is natural, but for a daughter to distance herself from her mother is arrogant. “The liberation of women cannot be won as a liberation from other women,” Suzanna Danuta Walters wrote in her book about mothers and daughters, “but only as a reaching toward everyone of us.”

I study the picture of my mother on her wedding day again and this time I see a teenage bride who left her beloved family to follow a man across an ocean because he hated being laughed at. Although she missed her family desperately, her emotional well-being was less important than maintaining the social order. She spent her youth bearing and raising six children to be clean-living and hard working like her mother before her and felt guilty about the time she stole for her love of politics. Her husband was a good provider, a faithful spouse, but he demanded much from her and gave little in the way of support beyond an allowance that was never adequate. My father would be shocked at my words. He sees himself as a good and generous man who loves his wife and family. My mother would support this view and then whisper an aside that it has never been easy living with a man who thinks he is perfect.

I understand now, after writing about my mother, that lives are shaped by the historical moment and by chance happenings—if my mother hadn’t dropped her cheese sandwich, would I be alive today? I have also changed with the telling: I have stopped being my mother’s easy child. Before, I was often frustrated talking to her. If she complained about some person’s lack of protocol or belittled someone’s unconventional dress or behavior, I seethed but, like an obedient child, did not contradict her. Slowly, over time, and not without fear, I have forced myself to say what I think. Surprisingly, this has never earned her wrath. Recently she told me that she finds it easier to talk to me than any of my sisters. “In my innocence, or call it by its true name, stupid willfulness,” Marilyn French writes, “ I imagined I could . . . break the chain of mothers, could free myself from the clinging fingers of a ghostly fate . . . What I wanted to escape from was not the past, but the pain.”

I cannot escape the past or the pain. I was born of a woman who was born of a woman who could not speak about menstruation, copulation, or conception. In not favoring their blood, their bodies, and their feminine nature with honorable mention, they inadvertently taught their daughters that the ways of the flesh are an embarrassment. I could not, with consciousness, pass on this legacy to my daughter. I found, through reading and writing, the courage to speak to her about menstruation and sex. Admittedly, I had to force the words from my throat and when they finally spilled forth, they were neither clever nor worldly, but I found my voice.

I could never stand up, in front of a crowd, like my mother, and speak my mind. But I can write my mind. When I ask her how she differed from her mother, she replied: “Mother knit. She knit beautifully and I suppose that’s why I learned to knit. But then I sewed. Mother never sewed.”

I Cannot Sing

There is so much I don't understand about my children. I wonder if my mother felt the same way. My daughter, for instance,  sometimes writes about her unhappy childhood and I am puzzled, even a little hurt. I pause here. This unhappiness could have nothing to do with me. Or it could. I think of her as a happy child.  We had such fun together. My happiest memories of my daughter are from our travels. We once took off just the two of us to meet friends in Italy. They left early and so we decided to have our own adventure. I let her decide on the destination. She wanted to go to Verona and visit Juliet's balcony. I remember her pulling her little suitcase behind, talking laughing sharing meals and beds. 

I think of my middle son as a little boy. He woke one day and told his dad about a dream he'd had. He was in a dark pit and all around him were screens showing the "bad" things he'd done. Rob laughed and asked what were these bad things and he said, "You don't expect me to tell you."

We all keep secrets.

My eldest son was especially reticent unless provoked. Once on a family vacation when we were trying to find activities that all three of our children would enjoy (difficult as they were four years apart), he said, "I do not appreciate your feeble attempts to make me happy."

Being a parent is the hardest job in the world.

I read this poem today by Edward Nathaniel Harleston and it reminded me of my mother and me.

I cannot sing, because when a child,  
   My mother often hushed me.  
The others she allowed to sing,  
   No matter what their melody. 

And since I’ve grown to manhood 
   All music I applaud,  
But have no voice for singing,  
   So I write my songs to God. 

I have ears and know the measures,  
   And I’ll write a song for you,  
But the world must do the singing  
   Of my sonnets old and new. 

Now tell me, world of music,  
   Why I cannot sing one song?  
Is it because my mother hushed me 
   And laughed when I was wrong?

Although I can write music,  
   And tell when harmony’s right,  
I will never sing better than when  
   My song was hushed one night. 

Fond mothers, always be careful;  
   Let the songs be poorly sung.  
To hush the child is cruel;  
   Let it sing while it is young.

I cannot say that I agree with this poem or that I even like it but it did evoke that time in my youth when I blamed my mother for everything. I didn't like her. I began an essay about her with a quote by Françoise Sagan:

"I continued to reflect that she was dangerous...she
prevented me from liking myself. I, who was so naturally
meant for happiness and gaiety, had been forced into
a world of self-criticism and guilty conscience... "

I spent thee years writing that essay about my mother. It was unbelievably painful but in the end, I understood where she was coming from and loved her. This turnabout still astonishes me.



           

Paris Adventure

(This was written for LeslieJane so if it sounds like an advertisement, it is.)

PARIS STRIKES

France has been hit by strikes and protests for the past six weeks, driven by anger over government plans to streamline the country’s complex pension system.

Getting around the city to view the collections for this fall and winter was difficult due to the strikes but thanks to Chris, the talented young photographer who joined the LESLIEJANE team for this adventure, we didn’t miss an appointment. 

Unfortunately our first appointment with Apuntab, was cancelled as their collection had not arrived from Italy so we walked to the “Pret Pour Partir” showroom where Xavier showed us his new urban rainwear. Several styles like the one shown here are made in his new “contrecolle coton jersey” that has an elegant twill finish.

With time to spare, I visited Tatiana at Manuelle Guibal’s Galerie Vivienne store and then caught the metro (one of the few running) to view Barbara Lang’s  fall collection. As elusive as ever, this wonderful designer will not allow pictures on the internet so you’ll have to wait until fall to see what’s new and exciting. 

The next day we had to take an Uber to Porte de Versailles.  Thank the heavens or rather Chris and his Citymapper app for always knowing which metro was working when (or not at all).

At La Fee Parisienne,  Lara the creator and designer of the most beautiful cashmere in the world (in our estimation) told us that she had spend over 1000 euros on taxis since the strike began. 

Soon we forgot our transit issues and were lost in her sumptuous cashmere. I even got Chris to try on one of her new scarves - rich colour on one side and muted on the other. Lara and I then did our usual cheesy shot and we were off to see Epice. 

Every season, this company that designs in Denmark and weaves in India, have a new theme. This falls, they celebrate their 40th anniversary, the circus and some very feminine florals. 

I must admit I have a special affection for Le Beret Francais: Nathalie (in the picture with me) loves to explain that every beret is hand-shaped using old-world methods. They come in an array of colours and are even made pint size for little folk. The company welcomed in the new year with a picture of my sweet grandson, Sebastian. 

Speaking of sweet (and more), Masa of Majestic Filatures was a great help in showing us Majestic’s  cotton cashmere and French terry collection. This company, begun in 1989, took the casual t-shirt and turned it into something extraordinary. Today, they make so much more than tees!

Our final appointment of the day was with Elemente Clemente who I’ve always admired for their great designs and ecological bent. I recently learnt that this German line has aligned itself with Jane Goodall so I spoke to Clemens Dörr, founder of Elemente Clemente about this alliance. He explained that his company has created a capsule collection  dedicated to Goodall’s environmental efforts. 

What can I tell you about the fall/winter collection? It’s a winner with many boiled wools (especially liked by our customers) and some of the colours are strong and vibrant - exactly what we need to brighten dreary winter days.

We finished just before 5:30 and raced for the metro as we knew the last train would depart at any minute. We made it just in time!

The next morning, we had a 8:30 appointment in the Marais so Chris picked me up in an Uber. Paris was quiet, only the street cleaners were about and so we made excellent time. 

We were lucky too in that the showroom was quiet and so we were able to view C.T. Plage, a Japanese knitwear design house without the usual crush. Severine lead us through the collection, more extensive and varied than I’ve ever seen. The artistry is pure Japanese, the construction superb and each unique style somehow works on all body types. 

Campomaggi from Italy is a collection of unique artisan bags with a worn look. It appeals to those who love a kind of beauty that is not standardized and is timeless. Every time I view these, there are surprises! I love the look!

Last but not least, we visited another showroom in the Marais to finally view Apuntab - or most of its new collection - one box had still not arrived.

As usual, the collection features the most beautiful fabrics in easy-to-wear styles that are flawless and timeless. And if you love colour as I do, this tomato orange is glorious. 

After, we walked and walked and finally caught a taxi to the airport. This trip wasn’t easy but it was rewarding.

Home for the Holidays

This Christmas was rather special. We had two of our three children home for Christmas. I cannot remember the last time this happened. And with Brendan came Jane and Seb, and with Gill came Derek. We did miss Michael, Kenzie and Isaac but for a family of five who choose to live in four different countries, "two out of three ain't bad". (I did have to remind myself that life is not perfect and one should be grateful even joyous with the gifts one is given and not be unhappy for what is missing.)

From the moment Gill and Derek arrived, I felt happy. It felt like a true Christmas. We wandered the Gaillac market buying last minute gifts and a feast for Brendan, Jane, and Seb who would be arriving the next day.

I must say that our little elf added an extra measure of joy. We had a wonderful feast of oysters and salmon when Jane and Brendan arrived with their precious boy and an easy Christmas eve day the next day preparing for yet another feast. Rob was up early to collect the turkey. Seb had several rides on his favourite tractor and a spin in the playground. As is our family's tradition, we watched "A Christmas Carol" in the evening.

Christmas day was pure gluttony. Omelettes and sausages for breakfast, turkey and stuffing, mushy peas, fresh cranberries, mashed potatoes and gravy, and courgettes for dinner, washed down with a glass or two of bubbly and red wine.

Our holiday continued in a similar vein - eating and wining well, a visit to Susan in the hospital, a romp through Albi, puzzle-solving, game-playing, movie-watching, and cavorting with the youngest member of our family.

Oh I forgot to mention that on Boxing Day, all seven of us when into Gaillac for the Christmas market and then onto the Chinese Lantern Festival which was quite spectacular. Sebastian especially was mesmerized by the coloured lights and the larger than life dinosaurs.

We had one more day with Brendan, Jane, and Seb and then they returned to London  too early and the house was very quiet indeed without the pitter-patter of little feet.

After they left, Gill and Derek moved in and these two put Rob and me to shame with their endless activity. One moment Gill is on the second landing doing yoga, the next she is off with Derek for a long country walk and the next, they are cycling down long country roads.

Gill and I even found time to do some proprioceptive writing and in-depth conversations. I loved every moment of my Christmas.

My children are so different and yet each brings me so much joy. All three work hard. All are kind people married to kind people. While I have been worrying about growing old and losing my dignity if not my mind, my beautiful children are struggling with careers, finances, and several with raising children - no small feat. They do not have a lot of time for contemplation and introspection.

My wish for 2020 is this:

I want time to reflect on this past year when I turned 70 and experienced one of my happiest moments and one of my most miserable. Japan and Fanny. How strange that they are tied together with an “and”. I lived a dream and lost one.  “No more deaths,” I cry but this is hopeless, impossible… like the death of our beloved Rosemary. We get old if we are lucky. We die. I wish to live at least another year to sort myself out although I have been attempting this all my life.

The poem “Red Brocade” by Naomi Shihab Nye seems a good place for me to start.

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.

Let’s go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.

The poem speaks to me of being open and kind and non-judgemental even to strangers, of giving the best I have to others like the beautiful red brocade pillow, of listening and not asking questions too soon, of not thinking of chores and inconsequential things when someone lands on my doorstep.

I am no longer young but I no longer have to struggle like my children working and building a financial base. I no longer have the difficult decisions that raising children involve. I am free. In 2020, I want to use my freedom, take lots of time to reflect, and listen more closely, and enjoy the moment.

A Profusion of Happiness and Sadness

All my thoughts are scrambled and will disappear if I don't record them.

Lately, there has been too much sadness. Too many people are dying. Some are people who I loved and some are people who I've never met but are the beloved of people I love. I want to decimate death. I don't want to be deprived of those who have enriched my life but this is selfish. I think of Rosemary who lived a great life but at 91 was wearing down. She did not want to continue. She'd get up every morning and think "damn it, I'm still here." My friend Mary wrote me: "Life is indeed precious. My mantra over the past couple of decades has been 'There’s Life and there’s Death. Everything in between is negotiable.'"

I believe that we have to make a conscious effort to be happy although there are those rare moments when it just drops into our laps. I really don't know how to explain this well so I googled happiness. "Regularly indulging in small pleasures, getting absorbed in challenging activities, setting and meeting goals, maintaining close social ties, and finding purpose beyond oneself all increase life satisfaction. It isn't happiness per se that promotes well-being, it’s the actual pursuit that’s key."

I like the idea of pursuit. I like the idea of indulging so I decided to take four days in Mallorca to escape the weight of sadness in this town but more so to have time with my youngest grandson who is so full of joy that it always bubbles over onto me. His mother and father are magnets too as they love to be on the move pursuing whatever gives them pleasure and most often their taste agrees with mine. And though I might groan and complain about the miles they make me walk to reach a gallery or restaurant, I am seldom disappointed.

If it looks like I had a good time, I did. Spanish tapas are the best and it is absolutely necessary to enjoy them with wine or beer - no complaining allowed. (Does it look like Jane and I are finding  it difficult?)

I am so grateful for my family and the times we share and how the good times roll easily when we are together. I am also grateful for my friends who trust me with missions and suggest things that they would like to do but can't: I find myself going places that I wouldn't usually go and doing things that I wouldn't think of doing.

This happened when I mentioned to David Reid that I was going to Mallorca. "Would you take a branch of my bay tree and leave it on Robert Graves' grave?" he asked. "Would you read a poem?" he further requested. So I set off for the island with a sprig of David's bay tree at the bottom of my suitcase. Brendan and Jane thought it a fine idea to have a mission so we took off my last day on an old fashioned train to Soller. The town was pretty enough but being Sunday and off-season there was very little open. Brendan asked if I'd mind a half hour walk to a restaurant that served suckling pig. And so we trudged along narrow scary roads with too much traffic for more than half an hour, not knowing what we'd find at the end of the road. It was perfect - a gracious family restaurant that served good food and wine in pleasant surroundings. After we had sated ourselves and inhaled two bottles of wine, we caught a taxi to Deia and found the cemetery.

We then wandered into the town centre - so beautiful - and lo and behold, we found a terrace tavern where we took refuge as Seb was asleep and if we moved him out of his stroller, he would have woken. We sat and had more wine and beer - for the boy's sake really.

The finale to our perfect day was a taxi ride back to our apartment in Palma along the coastline with its breathtakingly beautiful scenery.

I left early the next morning to spend a day travelling, arriving home at 7 in the evening. The next day Rob was to have his second and hopefully final operation.

Although I hate hospitals, I am happy that we left at 6:30 a.m. to drive (or rather to be driven by two very kind friends) to the hospital in Toulouse. Rob was tense. I was scared. After a very long day, we arrived home at 8 p.m. without the biggest blob of Rob's cancer. He underwent an operation called HIFU performed by Professor Pascal Rischmann who has been doing the procedure since 2006. This is modern medicine at its finest. No chemotherapy or radiation. No ugly side affects and although Professor Rischmann spoke to the FDA in the States noting that the treatment is safe and effective, that it preserves erectile function in more than 90% of patients through nerve sparing, and that it is cost- effective, FDA officials maintained that the benefit of HIFU is unclear and that the risk is substantial. Curious.

So happiness may be a little elusive at the moment but I have experienced a number of highs in the last week and am happy that we are here, where quality of life appears more important than the almighty buck (Rob's operation would have cost around 30,000 in Canada or the US. Here it is free.) I am happy too that I can escape to exotic places on whim and meet up with the British contingent of our family. I am not so happy that two of my children live so far away but Gill and Derek are coming for Christmas and we will fly to Vancouver in January to be with Michael, Kenzie and Isaac.

My Sweet Boy

This boy steals my heart every chance he gets. I just have to think of him and I grin. I will write about him at length soon, in true grandmother fashion, telling the world how great he is but for now all I want to do is introduce him to the blogging world where I can say whatever my heart desires and no comments are allowed. 

Oh just one more thing, he calls me "Lola" (Filipino for grandmother) to differentiate me from "Nanna" Jane's mother. I love it!

I still miss her

Death has been hitting me hard on the head the last half of this year and I struggle to understand it. Fanny's mother died a couple of weeks ago at the ripe old age of 91 years and I am sad that I will not sit at her table with her ever again, sipping red wine from a box, often smoking a cigarette and hearing her stories. She was an incredible woman but it's her youngest daughter who died June 3rd on her husband's birthday, in a restaurant choking on a piece of meat that fills me with despair.

Fanny was 62 years old and so full of life and plans for her new house. Like her mother, she was bossy and opinionated but she also had a tender heart and if someone needed her help - she was an expert seamstress, cook, and computer-savvy - she'd lend a hand even to those that she wasn't particularly fond of.

When Fanny hugged me, she'd squeeze me so tight that I'd have to catch my breath: I always felt cherished. The saddest thing about death is the void that person leaves and, selfishly speaking,  "losing" Fanny means that there is one person less in the world who loves me.

Tribute to Fanny  (read at her funeral)

She was my confidant and partner in crime.

Over the ten or so years that I’ve known her, she taught me a lot but her last lesson was the toughest. Life is fragile. She would be angry at the way she made her exit. She would hate the grief she is causing all of us but especially to her beloved Dave, Rosemary, and Judy. She had one of the biggest hearts in the universe.

She loved this village and the surrounding countryside. She adored her women’s quilting group. She participated in French/English meetings and attended every musical event and feast that happened when she was in town. When I think of her ceaseless energy, curious nature, and quick wit, I am so happy that “we’ll always have Paris”. [a line from Casablanca]

In Paris, Fanny was able to set aside her concerns and responsibilities for a few days and breathe freely. (She knew she had Sue, her good friend and neighbour in the UK to look out for Dave.) She loved Paris Fashion Week and our long walks and metro rides to the Porte de Versailles and Carousel de Louvre. She was an extraordinary assistant because of her skill with a camera and her extensive knowledge of fabrics and dressmaking. She had an eye for beauty. We laughed. We cried. We agreed that what we said in Paris stayed in Paris.

She would force me to walk for hours for the best croissant or a superior steak and frites. She had a refined palate and Paris with Fanny often cost me more than I made.

The last meal that Fanny prepared for Rob and me, in her new home (of which she was so proud and had great plans for) ended with a chili cheesecake. I was a little hesitant about
trying it but of course it was heavenly. She always cooked and served gastronomic delights.

On one of her birthdays, I made all of her favourite dishes ending with a zesty lemon cake. She stole the half that remained much to Dave’s chagrin and my delight. What a compliment!

I cannot condense this intelligent woman’s life into a few vignettes. She was too rich, too complex, and too lovely for words.

The Gauntlet

I am wondering if I can return here and begin posting again. Nearly nine years of my life is missing. I am not sure, at this moment, if this is whim or reality but I think I'd like to pick up the gauntlet again. I hope I am of solid mind and body.